In a recent post I mentioned that in 1957 when a new influenza emerged and triggered a pandemic called Asian Flu, Dr. Maurice Hilleman at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research quickly alerted the government and sent samples of the virus to the six biggest pharmaceutical companies directing them to produce a vaccine for this new flu which they did. As a result hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.
The point was that there is a precedent for the rapid development of flu vaccines!
Today anti-vaxxers are waging campaigns against COVID-19 shots and are citing all kinds of evil things that the vaccine spawns.
Anti-vaxxers are not new...opposition to vaccinations has existed as long as vaccination itself.
There was opposition to the smallpox vaccine in England and the United States in the mid to late 1800s that lead to anti-vaccination leagues. Later there were controversies surrounding the safety and efficacy of the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis immunization, the measles, mumps, and the rubella vaccine.
Widespread smallpox vaccination began in the early 1800s, following Edward Jenner’s cowpox experiments, in which he showed that he could protect a child from smallpox if they were infected with lymph from a cowpox blister.
The idea was met with immediate public criticism based on, depending on the individual's personal views, sanitary, religious, scientific, and political objections.
There was no Internet in those days, but in the closest thing they had, in 1802 there was a newspaper cartoon (like a Facebook meme of today!) in which the British satirist James Gillray implied that vaccination caused people to become part cow. It showed a crazed scene in which cows' heads erupted from the bodies of people being vaccinated.
For some parents the smallpox vaccination induced fear and they protested because the vaccination involved scoring the flesh on a child’s arm and inserting lymph from the blister of a person who had been vaccinated about a week earlier.
What was the problem with that? Some people, with the support of clergy, thought is was un-Christian because it was derived from an animal. Others were of the opinion that it was immoral to stop a disease that God had created.
Others distrusted medicine in general and didn't believe Jenner’s ideas about the spread of disease. Some believed that smallpox resulted from decaying matter in the air.
And, like today, some people objected to vaccination because they believed it violated their personal liberty, a problem that only got worse when the government developed mandatory vaccine policies.
In England there were vaccination acts in 1853 and 1867. The latter included penalties for refusal. The laws were met with resistance from citizens who demanded the right to control their bodies and those of their children. The Leicester Demonstration March of 1885 had 80,000-100,000 anti-vaxxers protesting in a march that included banners, a child’s coffin and an effigy of Jenner.
Toward the end of the 19th century, smallpox outbreaks in the United States led to vaccine campaigns and, of course, anti-vaccine activity. The anti-vaxxers waged court battles to repeal vaccination laws in several states.
In 1902, following a smallpox outbreak, the board of health of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, mandated all city residents to be vaccinated against smallpox.
A resident named Henning Jacobson refused on the grounds that the law violated his right to care for his own body how he knew best.
The city filed criminal charges against him and after losing his case Jacobson appealed to the Supreme Court. In 1905 the Court found in the state’s favor, ruling that the state could enact compulsory laws to protect the public in the event of a communicable disease. This was the first Supreme Court case concerning the power of states in public health law.
As Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 1:9. "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
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